Seychelles

HISTORICAL SETTING

Figure 7. Seychelles: Main Islands and Island Groups, 1994

Although known and visited by traders from the Persian
Gulf
area and East Africa in earlier times, the Seychelles
Archipelago
first appeared on European maps at the beginning of the
sixteenth
century after Portuguese explorers sighted the islands
during
voyages to India. Recorded landings did not occur until
1609,
however, when members of the British East India Company
spent
several days on Mahé and other nearby islands. A French
expedition from Mauritius reached the islands in 1742, and
during
a second expedition in 1756 the French made a formal claim
to
them. The name "Seychelles" honors the French minister of
finance
under King Louis XV. Settlement began in 1778 under a
French
military administration but barely survived its first
decade.
Although the settlers were supposed to plant crops only to
provision the garrison and passing French ships, they also
found
it lucrative to exploit the islands' natural resources.
Between
1784 and 1789, an estimated 13,000 giant tortoises were
shipped
from Mahé. The settlers also quickly devastated the
hardwood
forests--selling them to passing ships for repairs or to
shipyards on Mauritius. In spite of reforms to control the
rapid
elimination of trees, exploitation of the forest continued
for
shipbuilding and house building and later for firing
cinnamon
kilns, ultimately destroying much of the original ecology.

Possession of the islands alternated between France and
Britain several times during the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars. France ceded Seychelles--which at that
time
included the granitic group and three coral islands--to
Britain
in 1814 in the Treaty of Paris after rejecting a British
offer to
take French holdings in India in place of Seychelles.
Because
Britain's interest in the islands had centered mainly on
halting
their use as a base for French privateering, its main
concern was
to keep the islands from becoming burdens. Britain
administered
Seychelles as a dependency of Mauritius, from which they
received
little attention and few services.

The first European settlers were French who had been
living
on Mauritius, Reunion, or in French settlements in India.
Many
lived in conditions of poverty quite similar to those of
their
African slaves, who from early on greatly outnumbered the
remainder of the population. After the abolition of
slavery in
the islands in 1834, many settlers left, taking their
slaves with
them. Later, large numbers of Africans liberated by the
British
navy from slaving ships on the East African coast were
released
on Seychelles. Small numbers of Chinese, Malaysians, and
Indians
moved to the islands, usually becoming small traders and
shopkeepers. Intermarriage among all groups except the
Indians
was common, however, and left so few families of pure
descent
that by 1911 the practice of categorizing residents
according to
race was abandoned.

Before 1838 most Seychellois worked on white-owned
estates as
slaves, producing cotton, coconut oil, spices, coffee, and
sugarcane, as well as sufficient food crops to support the
population. After the abolition of slavery, they became
agricultural wage laborers, sharecroppers, fishers, or
artisans,
settling as squatters where they liked. Labor-intensive
field
crops rapidly gave way to crops that required relatively
little
labor, including copra, cinnamon, and vanilla. Only those
industries related to processing the cash crops or
exploiting
natural resources developed. As a result, the increasing
population quickly came to depend on imports for most
basic
necessities, including food and manufactured goods.